Marxist Literary Criticism Essay -- Literature Essays Literary Critici

While literary critics do attempt to elaborate or develop ideas articulated by Karl Marx, it is of the essence(p) and necessary to make a distinction between Marxs specific socio-economic and semipolitical agenda and the body of literary theory which emerged years later. Marxist literary criticism proceeds from the fundamental philosophical assumption that consciousness grass never be anything else than conscious existence...Life is not determined by consciousness, merely consciousness by life (Marx 568-9). Marxist critics use this challenge to the impulse of an innate, prefigured, individual human nature to reexamine the nature of creative or literary authority. Power seems to reside outside or beyond the edge of humanity. Rather than dipping into a world of universal forms or expressing a unobjective interior, artists and their work are determined by the web of power dealings in which they exist literature is thus inescapably tethered to a continuum of socio-political c oncerns. Hegemony is the term most often used by Marxist critics to disclose this continually renegotiat...